Background Within the framework of the EU health information system, a European Core Health Indictor (ECHI) is foreseen on home and leisure, sport and school injuries (ECHI-29). However in 2010, there were no reasonably comparable injury data available for these areas, but emergency department (ED) records offered a most valuable source of information.

Methods Based on previous experiences, the Joint Action on Monitoring Injuries in Europe (JAMIE) project (2010-2013) has developed a comprehensive Minimum Data Set (MDS), which can be recorded in EDs without adding noteworthy burden to staff and patients. MDS contains diagnoses and allows the enumeration of injuries in key areas as road, workplace, home and leisure, sport, school, work place, self-harm and assault. MDS data can be recorded directly or extracted from other datasets as ICD-10 or IDB-FDS (Full Data Set), which is used for recording injuries related to consumer products.

Results During 2011–2013, 26 countries have submitted national MDS data sets to the European Injury Data Base (IDB) in MDS format, and 20 countries have provided reference population data, enabling the calculation of ECHI29. There are about 31 million home, leisure, sport and school injuries each year in the EU-28, which is 76% of all injuries treated in EDs. 700.000 injuries occur at school, 5.9 million during sporting, and 24.7 million at home or during other leisure time activities. The average incidence rate was 6.1%, with a variation between 4.9% in Portugal and 8.9% in Luxembourg.

Conclusions MDS records from emergency departments can be the source for meaningful injury statistics and allow a differentiation by settings, age-groups and type of injuries. However, considerable variations between countries indicate that improvement of national methods is needed in order to increase cross-country comparability.